I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2011
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter and since I was working already I managed to convince the recruiter to let me bypass the phone screen and go straight to on-site interviews.
There were a total of 4 interviews that day from a specific team. The order of interviewers was random but for me it was : my future manager, Director of the team, a senior developer and a PM of another sub-team within that team. I dressed really casually (jeans & Tees) sitting next to a bunch of undergrad in suits. Guys please don't wear suits to tech interviews, not a brogrammer move.
The process was pretty tiring and my first 2 interviews were pretty good, 3rd one was ok and by the 4th one my brain pretty much decided to stop function at certain points. Also, the questions were mostly technical and actually somehow related to the kind of problem the team was solving so it gave me a pretty good idea of stuff I'll potentially work on. The interviewers were definitely smart and nice.
About half of the questions involves coding. My strongest lang was Java but I coded in JavaScript cause it's fast to cook up something, other than using verbose Java and stuff. They seem to appreciate the reasoning so make sure you know what ur doing/talking about.
The offer comes the next day (around 27 hours later to be exact). They move fast cause Amazon is hiring a lot.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What would u do if deadline is approaching and ur product is not finished?
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
